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Feedback on UI Manager

Hi all,

 

since I am finally doing an entire Workspace redesign in the new UI Manager I am starting this thread to give some feedback about what I am missing in the UI Manager.  It's not much, but I plan to expand this list as things come up. Maybe other users can weigh in with their experiences and we get all the bells and whistles we want in the next release. Please also point me to solutions to my requests if they already exist and I overlooked them. Here's what I want (Maybe I should write demandSmiley Wink), apart from the obvious possibility to write my own stuff in LV#:

  • Change Background Color in a Plot. Also, the access to the Plot appearance is a bit strange. I think there should at least be a link from the general properties to the plot properties
  • Horizontal Slider:
    • It scales a bit awkwardly since it's not possible to make smaller in y direction. Making the scale smaller only makes the slider bigger, which looks even worse.
    • The slider itself should be removable
    • It should be possilbe to add a second slider
  • Round Gauge:
    • Why can't I make it smaller than 125x125?
    • I'd like to add a second needle as well
  • Canvas:
    •  Labels should be hideable
    • The Angle of the gradient fill seems to be off by a few degrees: 45° looks more 60°
  • Elements on a Tab Control should "stick" to some common coordinates. The work around would be to create anchor object outside and align, but this feels complicated.
  • The Fill of the Tab Control leaves a white border, which I can live without.

Thanks in advance for all answers.



Remember Cunningham's Law
Message 1 of 11
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Hi everyone,

 

I'll interpret the fact that noone has answered yet as a sign that my requests are valid points.

Here's some more things I can do without:

  • The Control/Indicator palette is in my way everytime I edit something on the left side of the panel. So far I have been unable to move it out of the way...
  • If we can't hide the Labels, we might as well put it to good use: The font of the labels should be editable like in a normal text box
  • The gradient fill angle (important feature, aparently Smiley Wink ) seems to be relative to the aspec ratio of the box it fills...

Again, these are hardly showstoppers, just some things I noticed that would imho improve an already very good product.



Remember Cunningham's Law
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Message 2 of 11
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Thanks for all the feedback, and please send more as you have it.

 

There is a workaround for the two needles on a gauge or meter problem. You can drop a second gauge, turn of the "Show Scale" and "Show Label" options for this gauge, and then move the remaining needle on top of the first gauge. This isn't perfect (the two gauges won't resize or move together), but I wanted to make sure you were aware of the option.

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Message 3 of 11
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Hi Ben,

 

thanks for the workaround.

The problem with it is that I can't select that back one after I put the second one on top. This means I can't change the channel after designing the panel.



Remember Cunningham's Law
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Message 4 of 11
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Here's two more:

  • When hiding the boolean text of a checkbox, the area of the checkbox itself remains the same size. If you the move the label text to right center, there's just too much space between the box and the text. Obvious Workaround: Hide the label (why should I assume this works for checkboxes? Smiley Wink ) and write the text to the boolean text.
  • The Workspace resizes automatically as soon as you even get near the borders. This can become annoying when working close to the borders. This behaviour is aggravated by the fact that the panel is resized when moving an object if some other element is near the borders.


Remember Cunningham's Law
Message 5 of 11
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I'd like to:

  • be able to set both the true and false colors of boolean indicators (please correct if I'm wrong!!)
  • be able to change the fill on vertical sliders,  I have two signals one goes only positive the other goes only negative.  The negative slider is set with min -2000, max 0.   I place the two sliders so that the zero points overlap. With the slider (indicator) at zero, the whole negative slider is filled, I want to fill it from zero toward -2000 as the signal goes negative.
    • Workaround: I could add a calculated channel so that I am only dealing with one signal/slider combination, and I assume it would then only fill away from zero, but that doesn't seem as nice (system definition is already a cluttered mess of calculated channels).
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Message 6 of 11
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So nice thread this is!!

I also have a feedback, UI Manager doesn't have model control, doesn't it?

Is it expected that the feature will be implemented in the future?

Certified LabVIEW Developer
There are only two ways to tell somebody thanks: Kudos and Marked Solutions

GCentral
Message 7 of 11
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So here's a thing I found out:

- The canvas label is hideable through the context menu

 

And some more things I want (Christmas coming up and so on...):

- have different texts for both states of the text button

- The Limits and warnings function has aparently disappeared. My customer uses it two have several colors for the same boolean indicator, so what beavercreek mentioned would be enough on this occasion

- Is there a way to invert a button?

- It would be really nice to be able to define custom colors for Buttons and LEDs. The colors already in the UI Manager look good in this context, but sometimes you want a good old 255,0,0 when it needs to pop.

- I've had the UI Manager crash both on my customer's and on my machine when adding a line to a canvas within a tab control and then trying to edit it. I'm unsure if a double click or the try to resize the object causes the crash. It also seems like the line is not really added to the canvas, but overlayed on top of it all.

- Because of the last point, autosaving seemed desirable to me as well



Remember Cunningham's Law
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Message 8 of 11
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What I would REALLY like to have need is an API to programmatically create controls. I know I can add an array of numeric inputs for a group of signals, but what if I have a custom instrument (boolean + slider) that I want to replicate tens of times?

Message 9 of 11
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+1. Definitely - API would be a huge selling point on UI Manager. 

Piotr F.
Hardware Engineer @ ZF
Message 10 of 11
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